The generation of British actors that emerged in the 1950's and 60's -- led by Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole, Tom Courtenay and Alan Bates -- was exactly in tune with the playwrights of the time. In unison they opened up the British theater to new...

December 31, 2003, Wednesday

Alan Bates, the versatile British actor who forged his name on the West End stage in John Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' in 1956 and went on to captivate audiences on both sides of the Atlantic in a wide-ranging film, theater and television career,...

December 29, 2003, Monday

For Alan Bates, A Role's a Role Alan Bates doesn't have a whole lot of screen time in ''The Sum of All Fears,'' the new thriller adapted from one of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels that opens nationally today (review, Page 1 of Weekend). But as an...

New York, N.Y. The subject is New York. The medium is poetry. The poets bear names like Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Elizabeth Bishop. The message is to be delivered by some 20 show business personalities, from...

It may be your opinion that the last thing Manhattan needs is another drunken windbag, the kind who ruins dinner parties by driveling and ranting through every course, spitting food and sloshing wine. But please let Alan Bates help you to reconsider...

April 3, 2002, Wednesday

When actors face off, the results can be as stimulating to them as to the audience. In ''Fortune's Fool,'' adapted from a play by Ivan Turgenev and opening on Tuesday at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, Alan Bates and Frank Langella portray...

March 31, 2002, Sunday

IN a rehearsal room eight floors above West 43rd Street, a wiry wisp of a gent is standing so close to the actors that you might mistake him for their dermatologist. When they speak their lines, it is he who registers the biggest reactions: looks of...

February 24, 2002, Sunday

Chekhov's ''Cherry Orchard'' portrays as stingingly as any work of literature how patterns of family wealth often play out in the modern world. With devastating delicacy, it illustrates the principle of deceleration by which the idle rich allow...